Cherri Pancake named president of Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced the election of President Cherri M. Pancake. Pancake is professor emeritus at Oregon State University and director of the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (NASCE), an interdisciplinary research center known for software systems that analyze large-scale scientific data. She will lead the organization for a two-year term from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2020.

President-elect Pancake said her key priorities include building bridges between those working in diverse areas of the field, and attracting new groups.

“ACM is uniquely positioned to be the ‘glue‘ that joins emerging practitioner communities with classical computer scientists,” said Pancake. “I believe ACM must proactively engage new groups, providing conference and publication opportunities that will foster advances across the field. We also must attract new people from diverse backgrounds, not just to meet the growing demand for computing professionals but to enrich the ideas and processes used in computing research.”

Pancake is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. She started her career as an ethnographer conducting fieldwork in Guatemalan communities, where she applied cross-cultural techniques to study social change. After earning a PhD in Computer Engineering, she leveraged her ethnographic expertise to address problems in computing.